Yeah I have always heard that the spike on these was for driving nails or 
spikes down into the wood while an adzing.....Don't know maybe,... but you 
know I have seen lots of these adzes esp. older ones where the the "spike" 
was much to big to drive any nails down past the wood surface so whats up 
with that ?. Also how big a problem really was spikes in logs that were 
being adzed? and what do you do with the nail you are knocking down into the 
wood , if you just leave it there won't you just hit it again as you adze 
more wood off going down toward it...I've seen a load of hewing axes and 
never seen one with a spike on it...got to think if they ran into them while 
adzing guys also ran into nails while hewing wood, eh?...  how come they 
don't have a spike on thier axes to drive them down like they did while 
adzing?.

 I was at a yard sale once of an old guy that was a wooden boat builder and 
had actually built a few Skip Jacks and worked on Chesapeake bay log canoes 
and I bought a couple of his spike ship adzes and I asked him about those 
spikes. Told him I had always heard they were for drving in nails or spikes 
that were in the wood....He got a big laugh about that  and admited he had 
heard that too but never from anybody that had used them. He told me when 
they were building a boat they would drill  holes in the wood from the 
outside to the depth they wanted the wood to be thick , then they would adze 
down till they hit the hole stop and then plug them with a wooden dowel they 
carried in thier pocket and  knocked in place with the Adze poll then keep 
on working. Said with out these holes  very hard or impossiable to know 
exactly how thick the wood is since they are working inside the boat's hull. 
He even told me the reason he thought old Adzes have a bigger poll was 
because back then they used bigger dowels because they drilled bigger holes, 
latter ones used smaller holes and dowels......Interesting.....he alson 
confirmed my suspician that the reason you see so many lip adzes with the 
lips ground off was because it makes them easier to sharpen.

 One of the better yardsales I've been too and I still have his ship adze 
with the neat carved handle that he sold me for $15......Todd 

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